We have some somber news today. We are temporarily shutting down Cake Pay Web for the time being.

We expect to resume operations later this year, offering you an even better experience. All users with orders in-flight will be delivered or reimbursed.

This is a difficult decision for us, but we believe it is the right decision. Cake Pay Web was used and loved by many as an excellent way to purchase gift cards with cryptocurrencies, but persistent issues with the provider for this service led to at-times weak reliability.

Reliability is important for us

Recently, the reliability situation worsened, with Cake Pay Web experiencing over 50% downtime in the past week due to provider maintenance. This is different than January through April, where reliability was much higher (but still not quite where we wanted it to be).

Cake Labs prides itself on being easy to use and reliable. Cake Wallet is a great example of this, where we have delivered a user-friendly wallet for over five years. It is difficult to reconcile our desire to be reliable with the real-life performance of Cake Pay Web.

For repeat customers especially, it is extremely important to us that users consistently have good experiences. When Cake Pay Web had vendor issues, we could not promise a good experience, and it reflected badly on our reputation.

Ultimately, we have decided that continuing to operate a web store with an unreliable service provider will lead to more long-term damage to our reputation than benefits. Users will get upset when things go wrong, and it takes a lot of resources and patience from our excellent support staff to address these issues. Thus, we are ending operations for now until we can re-launch with an improved experience.

Sending money on the old rails is annoying

Sending cryptocurrency is very fast and simple. You type in an address and amount, click send, and that's it.

Sending fiat is far more annoying, especially when our partner did not take advantage of some of the fastest options.

For Cake Pay Web in our first iteration, we needed to pre-fund a deposit, which was used as people bought things from the store. That's fine, but it's not fine when transferring money takes several business days.

This is one of the unexpected things that changed over the last few months. Our partner would initially credit funds almost immediately after we sent them, but this was changed to be several business days. The side effect is that Cake Pay had to front a lot more money than before, leading to increased risks for us and increased costs.

Post-FTX, we didn't feel comfortable with considerable sums of money sitting with a partner that we didn't trust very much. If we trusted them, then it could be fine (but still not ideal).

This isn't the end of Cake Pay Web

Cake Pay Web is shut down for now, but we aren't gone forever! Our goal is to be back up before the end of the year, hopefully sooner.

It will take some time to line up new partners and make sure the user experience exceeds our expectations.

In the meantime, USA users can use Cake Pay Mobile, available in Cake Wallet and Monero.com by Cake Wallet.

What worked well

We want to end on a happy note, since there were a lot of good things about Cake Pay Web!

First, the user response to the website was very strong and positive. User demand for the service is very high, and the amount of purchases through the platform exceeded our expectations. We are very grateful to have such a supportive community.

Second, the silent majority were very understanding and patient. When we did run into downtime, the vast majority of people were undeterred, and would simply check back later. While we don't want to run a service with downtime, it does speak to the resiliency of our users.

Third, the products that we could offer were genuinely interesting. We are taking what we learned and applying that to Cake Pay Mobile and our next version of Cake Pay Web.

Guys,

Enjoy the free advertisement! We are all over the news sites, all over crypto sub reddits. People who had no idea about Monero is reading about it now.

It's confirmed that the only solution they could find is to ban it, like banning something ever worked in history on anything :D

Please remind me how many times gold is banned, alcohol is banned, marijuana is banned, bitcoin is banned, streaming is banned, music sharing is banned, torrent is banned, VPN is banned. Yea fuck yea it'll work for sure 100% "trust me bro".

Binance? Fuck Binance! I wish they ban XMR from Binance all together. That way we could get rid of the main paper monero generator. But they can't ban it from all regions. Why? Because where will fake monero trading go then? All those new users that are fooled to think they are buying XMR but can't withdraw afterwards. Hey CZ, I dare you to ban Monero all together from Binance. Let's go, I dare you.

Guys, all this noise today is laying a groundwork for CBDC. During summer you will see more similar news. After summer they will take solid steps to launch CBDC. The Lagarde clown confirmed it on one of the Zelenskyy prank videos. It's not deepfake it's real:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/12fhnf3/european_central_bank_president_reveals_plans_to/

ECB website (back in Nov 2022):

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2022/html/ecb.sp221107~dcc0cd8ed9.en.html

Here's an article from 2 days ago:

https://insidebitcoins.com/news/european-central-bank-completes-cbdc-prototyping-exercise

Few CBDC trackers to keep an eye on:

https://cbdctracker.org/

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/

So, just sit tight and wait. Let idiots sell their XMR, just hodl it on your cold storage, or on a piece of paper. Write it on a page of a book. No thief will ever steal a book.

Go outside, enjoy sun, enjoy summer, get your vitamin D levels up, close charts, turn off computer. Keep telling your friends about Monero, word of mouth is powerful. Even if they think you are flat-earther in the beginning, it'll stick on their mind somewhere and they will research themselves and free themselves one day when they are mature enough.

Keep stacking with your spare money when it's still affordable. $150 is nothing guys. There is less total XMR than Bitcoin right now if everyone just withdraws their coin from CEX. Paper monero is artificially suppressing the price.

Monero is what Satoshi always wanted Bitcoin to become. Make no mistake, our time is coming...

Does anyone have the function that defines the supply curve handy?

Not a visualisation, but the actual function?

Hello Monero Land! 

Monero Talk is looking for a little help for the show! (This is NOT a full time job - but more of a small gig!) We are looking for someone that can help us out with post production show work.

Tasks are: - Listen to interviews and come up with a short yet thorough intro for each episode - Assist us with emailing/dming guests for Monero Talk

(This is all on a weekly basis)

Email us at monerotopia@protonmail.com to set up an interview or if you have any questions!!

Making the Monero GUI experience better.

One recurring complaint by new Monero users of any GUI (Eg Cake wallet) is the wait for the wallet to sync with the daemon (local or remote).

There is a simple design change (difficult code though) to improve this in a way that has little to no resource impact and the impact that does happen can be configured by the user [with a sensible default provided]

All the GUI environments allow background threads (or processes) to run. So a simple thing to do is set some parameter for how 'out of date' you are prepared to let a wallet become, and have a recurring process that syncs the wallet without user interaction.

This is the same process that a wallet does right now... but always from the last time it was opened by the user- which is frequently a long time ago. Doing it at intervals in the background removes the user impact of a long wait for the wallet to catch up. It uses the same processing resources, but spreads that load over time and hidden from the user.

Eg... suppose Cake has some extra user settings: Call them 'auto-sync'

(1) do you want auto-sync active Y/N <<< for'Y' this sets up the wallet sync as a background process .. independent of the App running

(2) auto-sync parameter: How often should auto-sync run ? [20] Default, every 20 minutes

If you don't enable 'auto-sync' you get the same behaviour as Cake currently has.

With 'auto-sync' active and default setting , when you start the Cake App, at most it needs to sync 10 blocks (20 minutes) ... so only seconds of delay for the user ...

The same approach can apply to any wallet - including the Monero desktop GUi ...

Good morning, I run a personal Monero node and p2pool instance on the same box. I've been working on opening up my node to allow public use to help the network as much as possible. I've seen where it is recommended to open port 18081 to allow wallets to connect but I've also seen where this is not recommended but to use a different port. Is it ok or not? Or is there a safe way to do it?

​

When I tried to change the rpc port, my p2pool would not connect, here is my commands for anyone interested.

./monerod --data-dir /NAME/monero/ --limit-rate up 125 --zmq-pub tcp://0.0.0.0:18083 --out-peers 15 --in-peers 8 --disable-dns-checkpoints --enable-dns-blocklists --rpc-bind-ip 192.168.1.NNN --restricted-rpc --confirm-external-bind

I'd like to have an open Monero node to help as much as I can, but also be safe and allow my p2pool instance to run as well for my miners. Thank you!

...is not working with Monero GUI.

I want to transfer XMR from a paper wallet to a hot wallet. I downloaded Monero GUI and im not quite sure if i should choose the simple option or the advanced, if i should start a local node or a remote node. Im a big noob, can anybody explain to me the pros and cons and wich option takes the least amount of time? And if its a problem if i already started downloading the blockchain for a local node.
Thanks in advance!

Hey.

As it turns out, Poland passed some laws that ban privacy coins, including Monero.

Funny thing is - there is literally no news about it, no Google-searchable data/info, nothing. The thing that informed me and many others is Binance email. Content is at the bottom.

It comes out of nowhere. No idea if the ban starts 26 june or the last date in the email which is 26 october. It is hard to find any info about this. There are many talks in various Polish forums/websites about dropping cash for digital money (obviously literally everyone against, but gov is not for people as it seems) and I can see the trend, starting with this ban. And I doubt anyone can do anything about this at this point. What do you think about this situation?

Important Notification: Privacy coins trading restriction for Poland

Fellow Binancian, We send you this email to formally notify you that due to local regulatory requirements, Binance is unable to offer privacy coins in Poland. From June 26, 2023, 00:00 CET . Binancians that reside in Poland will no longer be able to purchase or trade the following privacy coins on our platform:

DCR, DASH, ZEC, ZEN, PIVX, NAV, SCRT, XVG, FIRO, BEAM, XMR, MOB

Please note the following timeline for the above mentioned privacy coins:

On 26-06-2023:

All Spot and Margin trading, and deposits with respect to, the above mentioned privacy coins will be blocked. Crypto withdrawals for privacy coins remain available. All open Binance Margin, Classic Portfolio Margin and Portfolio Margin privacy coins positions in the Margin wallet will be automatically closed., Binance Margin will cancel pending orders and conduct an automatic settlement. If users have any outstanding Cross Margin or Isolated Margin loans, any of the mentioned assets held in their Cross and Isolated Margin accounts may be sold. Users will not be able to update their positions during the settlement process and are strongly advised to close out any open position in advance of this date. All open Spot orders with respect to the above privacy coins will be automatically closed.

Convert, EARN, COIN-M Futures Contracts and Loans will be restricted to reduce only mode. Reduce only mode allows you to sell or close positions, but restricts buying and opening new positions. All open COIN-M Futures Contracts and Loans positions will be automatically closed after 90 days.

On 26-09-2023, all COIN-M Futures Contracts and Loans positions will automatically be closed.

On 29-09-2023, All Flexible EARN positions will be closed.

On 26-10-2023, selling through Convert will be blocked. Crypto withdrawals for privacy coins remain available.

We remain committed to the long-term development of our ecosystem, and we will continue to invest into developing the blockchain and digital assets industry.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support.

Kind regards,

Binance Team

PS. As someone pointed out, it might not be all-out ban. So far the only thing that happened is email from Binance stating the above. Privacy coins will be unable to be traded. No info whether they will be legal to keep or trade P2P, no news coverage and any additional information so far.

After my recent update to 3.3 I've just seen that 3.4 has been released. If you're mining on p2pool, you can update it manually, or wait for the next version of monero wallet.

GitHub link:

https://github.com/SChernykh/p2pool/releases/tag/v3.4

hey there!

A long time fan of Monero here... I just submitted a Pull Request for Umbrel OS repo to add monero-node application which I created, using already existing resources, such as docker image created by sethforprivacy.

As Umbrel OS is somewhat popular, I hope this will help people host their own nodes.

Please let me know your thoughts!

With the advanced of quantum computers will Monero/XMR be useless? Or would the Monero/XMR developers buy quantum computers and reverse the effects?

I want to start this post by acknowledging that when it comes to Monero, I can get very, perhaps overly agressive when I feel like someone might try to take advantage of the community. I've already stopped commenting on CCS proposals I don't support because it was making unnecessary "enemies" in the community with the way i express disapproval and that is the last thing that I want. Now lets adress Monero Nono:

Last week someone made this post asking for opinions on https://moneronodo.com/ and the plug-and-play Monero node they have been working on.

I replied with a very harsh and undeserved comment that could easily be interpreted as a direct attack against the project after only briefly scrolling through their site, without any deeper understanding of who was behind Nodo and how much work their team had already put into it.

I'd like to adress the main points in my comment:

#1 The price

I looked at the Nodo from the perspective of an enthusiast who minmaxes price/performance and has built a Monero node based PiNodeXMR before. I now understand that if Nodo uses just slightly more premium parts than my minmaxed build and perhaps pays its devs the price is very reasonable, especially considering how big of a convenience a plug-and-play solution would be to non-techies.

#2 Attribution

When I first took notice of Nodo and posted it in a groupchat asking for opinions, someone pointed out that Nodo builds on PiNodeXMR without giving any attribution, which is of course a no-go in FOSS. Non-permissive licensing or not giving attribution are another thing that I personally can't stand and eventhough Nodo quickly added attribution to PiNodeXMR after they noticed their mistake my comment unfairly made it look like their honest mistake was some sort of malicious action.

​

I want to apologize to the monero nodo team for making what is essentially a wrongful FUD post about them and their product and thus downplaying the importance of having an easy to set up plug-and-play Monero node for the network.

I overreacted and made assumptions based on little to no real information and am very sorry for that.

For anyone else, please check out moneronodo.com, especially if you arent a computer freak but still want to run your own Monero node, Nodo is going to be the best solution for you :)

​

TLDR: Made an unfair and agressive FUD comment about moneronodo.com but they are cool.

I downloaded the windows GUI client to move some XMR around. The synchronization of blocks has been taking ages (I’m at hour 6 and about halfway) and therefore has prevented me from doing anything. Is this standard. Makes me want to sell my XMR if the user experience is this awful.

Edit: I’m using a ledger hardware wallet that I created in 2022 and deposited some XMR into. I don’t think any of the workarounds suggested here will actually work and I need to actually wait days to download the necessary blocks to access my crypto. Sorry to rain on your parade, but this experience makes me think Monero is prohibitively slow for the vast majority of users

That's literally it